Desktop Computer Review: Fusion-io 80GB eXtreme Bundle Review

First of all, let me start with some good things about these cards.They arrive is some very atrtractive packaging and the cards themselves look like a "polished" product.

Next something important to be aware of before you buy.The ioXtreme line is NOT compatable with server operating systems.They are not supported on Server 2003/2008 ect.These cheaper (relatively speaking) cards are targeted to gamers and high-end workstation users.(Though we were able to install the "Pro" card on Server 2003 and do some testing, the "non-pro" card did not work at all).

Finally, performance.Are these cards fast?Well, it depends on how you look at it.From a raw file transfer speed benchmark perspective, yes they are Jaw-Dropping fast.We could not quite duplicate the published specs even on Xeon server hardware, but it was still impressive.But at what cost in other areas?The hard truth is that these cards use a software raid chip that takes significant amounts of CPU cycles to work it's fast file read/write magic.In our custom software application that is both CPU and Disk intensive we saw very little to no measureable overall performance gains running off these cards.After reviewing all the parameters we concluded that the CPU penalty when using these cards completely offset the Disk I/O gains.Before buying one of these, make sure you will have available CPU cycles to feed this card in whatever you intend to use it for.See the review over at HotHardware for an indication of the amount of CPU required:[...]

Overall Recommendation:Thumbs down.There are other competing products out there that while less "polished" in their implementation, perform better overall for the money.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Fusion-io 80GB eXtreme Bundle

Product Description:
The Fusion-io eXtreme Bundle is the ideal starting point for your high performance storage solution needs. Consisting of one 80GB ioXtreme, and one 80 GB ioXtreme Pro, the eXteme Bundle gives you the most performance at the best price. The ioXtreme and ioXtreme Pro were created as a scalable storage solution to help you to get the most performance from your workstation. We took advanced supercomputer storage technology and scaled it down to create the 80 GB ioXtreme, and make it fit in a single PCI Express card. The ioXtreme has a throughput of 700 MB/s Read and 280 MB/s Write. The simplified NAND flash controller architecture required to fit this kind of phenomenal performance onto a single PCIe card, allows only one 80 GB ioXtreme to function in the computer. For those users that need even more performance for their demanding workstation applications, we created the ioXtreme Pro which builds on the industry leading performance of the standard ioXtreme by adding proprietary X-Link technology which allows you to aggregate multiple ioXtreme Pros with one standard ioXtreme card over the PCI Express bus. The ioxtreme products bring the world's fastest storage to enterprise PC's and workstations including the desktops of independent media artists, film compositors doing development, editing and point-cached work.